I've recently purchased the game and thought I'd give a dynasty thread a whirl. I can see that the community here is pretty much gone, but hopefully the few of you out there enjoy the story of my game. This is my first real game so I'm sure there will be plenty of mistakes and errors along the way.

I start in 1984 with the Chicago Bulls - fresh off picking up the hotly rated Michael Jordan, who will wear the #17.

My goals for this game are as follows:

Win an NBA Championship during the 1980's

Win more than 6 Championships before the year 2000

A few notes; at this early stage my trading style is probably best described as "reactive" as I'm not actively chasing trades - I want to slowly build the team up properly and not ruin the harmony and cohesion by changing too much too soon. That's not to say I won't do any trades, but it will likely be trying to trade up in the early drafts as we build and moving around parts of Jordan's support. It's also worth noting that the colour ratings in my game go 'red-amber-green-blue-silver-gold' so don't be alarmed that the colours don't match the default settings.

I didn't want to make any changes to the side early on, figuring that it's best to find out what really needs changing and where we really need to improve before making any moves.

This is our starting roster; ranked by current ability:

As you can see, we have a really good side to start the season - no duds and I wouldn't be surprised if we made the playoffs without making any wholesale changes.

It's clear that the star will be Jordan but I fully expect both Woolridge and Dailey to be very good for us. We're well stocked for Power Forwards on the bench but without many options at Small Forward.

We went into the preseason with decent expectactions and found pretty good results with our starting five being:

The Bulls started on an absolute tear; winning the first 9 games on the bounce before losing in overtime at the Nets. Jordan was lighting the court up, taking two Player of the Week awards and both the Rookie and Player of the Month for November.

We also secured our first trade on November 10th; sending PF Sidney Green to the Cavaliers along with our 1st round pick for 1986 to get starting PG John Bagley.

We continued into December on a hot streak but injuries were about to hit us hard. We lost Woolridge to a sprained knee for 7 days after beating the Pistons; Dailey strained his back against the Cavaliers and was out for 17 days; Woolridge came back and broke his finger against the Nuggets - out for another 12 days; before Matthews pulled his groin against the Hawks to miss 9 days.

After that chaos, here are our stats at the turn of the year:

Despite the injuries we were still comfortably leading the division.

January saw us suffer more injuries and make a couple of big trades - but we could never find a rythm.

First injury of the month was Dailey for 19 days thanks to a broken jaw at the Pistons; this was followed by the loss of Higgins with plantar fasciitis for 59 days; and then a huge loss of Jordan with a broken ankle against the Bullets for 49 days forcing him to miss the All-Star game; finally Dailey returned and was out again with patellar tendanitis against the Clippers missing another 33 days.

Our first trade on January 8th was a view to the future; sending both David Greenwood and Wes Matthews to the Los Angeles Clippers along with our 1st round pick for 1985 in order to gain their 1st round pick for 1985 (potentially the #1 pick). We then traded out of neccessity due to injuries - sending Caldwell Jones and our 2nd pick for 1986 to the Knicks in return for Rory Sparrow.

The majority of Sparrow's stats here are from the Knicks obviously.

Still comfortably at the top of the division and the conference despite missing Jordan.

In other news, Orlando Woolridge became my first All-Star - playing a whole 1 minute for the East.

With a skeleton squad it was looking like our run-in might get a little difficult. We'd exhausted all our options so getting more numbers in before the trade deadline was not happening.

Aside from Bagley missing a game due to a migrane, the rest of February was quiet on the injury front as we slowly got more players back but couldn't build momentum. Along the way Woolridge took a Player of the Week award proving his All-Star status

March however, was back to our very best and put beyond a doubt that this season was an unmitigated success. Jordan came back and put up some good numbers - taking back-to-back Player of the Week awards from the league. The 17 missed games was too much and kept him out of MVP contention and he missed both the All-Rookie and All-NBA teams.

Bagley was our only constant on our starting line as he didn't miss a game (even played an extra game due to the timing of his trade). Scoring was all about Woolridge and Jordan - and it's scary to think how this season could have gone without injury.

We cruised to the Eastern conference title and will take the #1 seed into the Playoffs at our first attempt. Over the in West, take a look at the 2-win Clippers season - the worst in history. To make matters worse for them, we have their first round draft pick as they got desperate and traded it away for a couple of our bench warmers.

And here is the lineup for the 1985 NBA Playoffs:

I'm not expecting anything from this post season; if we make it to the East Finals I'll be ecstatic. We should get past the Pacers but I'm a little nervous about the Hawks and Wilkins. The Finals will probably be taken by whoever comes out of the West on top - either the Trail Blazers or the Lakers; but I'll take a punt on Portland to take home the chip.

Always awesome to see any dynasty in this forum, but I'm pretty excited about this one as the Bulls are such a fun powerhouse team to work with. And having that first round pick thanks to those incredibly sucky Clippers should be interesting as there are some great names available in the next draft!